The Beats

September 28, 2007

I knew there was something missing from all the On the Road anniversary celebrations earlier this month:

In a rare move by a publishing house, the Penguin Group is suing a prolific biographer for the return of a $200,000 advance on the grounds he didn't deliver a manuscript by the contracted due date. The author, Douglas Brinkley, was commissioned in 1998 to write a biography of the 1950s "Beat" writer Jack Kerouac in time for the 50th anniversary of his breakthrough 1957 novel "On the Road." Because Mr. Brinkley was unable to complete the manuscript in time, the Penguin Group filed suit this week in state Supreme Court in Manhattan to wrest back the $200,000 they had advanced to Mr. Brinkley and the Kerouac estate.Typically in such situations, publishers simply cut their losses or privately negotiate settlements with authors, according to industry experts.

Mr. Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University in Houston who has had five of his biographies selected as "Notable Books" by the New York Times, said he had been unaware of the lawsuit until he was contacted by The New York Sun, and that he thought it was "just a snafu between three parties."

According to the suit, the original deadline was December 2001, which Mr. Brinkley and Penguin extended to September 2005, and then to June 2006.

September 25, 2007

Three quickies before I start my day with a nice breakfast of Excel washed down with a warm cup of Project:

A few weeks ago after mentioning the fact that I had no idea that Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC, I asked if anyone knew what other famous person spent a significant amount of time in that small town not far from Raleigh. Well, the News & Observer decided to help you out with the answer.

This MetaFilter post is the perfect way to waste away the day, especially if your idea of wasting is checking out what seems to be an endless supply of Nick Cave-related links, including a boatload of videos, all in celebration of the man's 50th birthday.

Finally, Luis Alberto Urrera has posted a poem of his that appeared in the recent immigration edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review. A must read.

September 24, 2007

“Beat” is old carny slang. According to Beat Movement legend (and it is a movement with a deep inventory of legend), Ginsberg and Kerouac picked it up from a character named Herbert Huncke, a gay street hustler and drug addict from Chicago who began hanging around Times Square in 1939 (and who introduced William Burroughs to heroin, an important cultural moment). The term has nothing to do with music; it names the condition of being beaten down, poor, exhausted, at the bottom of the world. (It’s used often in this sense in “On the Road.”) In 1948, Kerouac is supposed to have remarked, in a conversation with the writer John Clellon Holmes, “You know, this is really a beat generation” (followed by a spooky “only the Shadow knows” laugh), and Holmes thought enough of the phrase to use it as the working title of a novel, eventually published as “Go,” and to write an article for the Times Magazine, in 1952, called “This Is the Beat Generation,” in which he credited Kerouac with the term. (The article was solicited by the man who, five years later, wrote the Times’ review of “On the Road,” Gilbert Millstein.)

Holmes wasn’t referring to a movement. He was referring to the Cold War generation, which, he said, had been disillusioned by the war, the bomb, and the “cold peace,” but was obsessed with the question of how life should be lived. Holmes thought that Beats were optimists, risk-takers, seekers—young people with “a desperate craving for belief.” The article popularized the concept, and Kerouac began using it himself. “Beat Generation” was one of his early titles for “On the Road.” (Another was “Shades of the Prison House.”) After the book came out, he wrote a play called “Beat Generation,” an article for Esquire on “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” and another for Playboy on “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” in which he added “beatific” to the meanings of “Beat.” In interviews up to the end of his life, he talked about his conception of the Beat Generation, and the literary movement associated with it, proudly, affectionately, and defensively. In his final appearance on television, a falling-down-drunk performance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” he insisted that his idea of beatness had nothing to do with the hippies (whom he despised).

It’s true that the Beat writers were caricatured and abused. In the literary world, academic critics, whose aesthetic was all about form and restraint, ignored them, and the New York intellectuals, whose ethic was all about complexity and responsibility, attacked them. Irony was the highbrow virtue of the day, and the Beats had none. This response probably did matter a little to Ginsberg and Kerouac. They were Columbia boys. They had genuine literary aspirations, and they wanted to be taken seriously. On the other hand, they could hardly have lived in hope of the approval of people like Diana Trilling and Norman Podhoretz.

You might expect me to do nothing today but lounge in my LaZBoy, drink strong coffee, read the last paragraph of On the Road over and over and, as far as the blog, do nothing but link to Kerouac items. But unfortunately I'm unable to take a day off from the paying gig to pay honor to On the Road's fiftieth birthday. I will put up a few items of note here and there as time allows. I've written before about how much this book and Kerouac meant to a fifteen-year-old boy in small town Alabama, one full of innocent wanderlust who could through the pages of that book imagine that there was still an American frontier to explore. And even better, that that frontier could be found both in the real world and in the pages of a book.

I confess, I didn't much like the book at first; the opening pages seemed callow and I bridled at the way the women are disposed of, as if utterly lacking in intellectual worth. But by the end, I felt the ground had shifted under me; and the terrain I was on was wobblier and stranger than I had expected it to be. When we talk about On the Road today, we tend to exclaim over its sense of headlong movement and the convivial energies of friendship and bebop and excessive consumption (of alcohol, of Benzedrine, of sex, of gasoline) that animate it. But having heard so much about all that, the quality that struck me most was how much anxiety and constraint suffuse the book, too. This isn't just a jolly quest for "kicks" and beautiful girls and good times to be had at cheap prices. It's a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to—the famous search for "IT," a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found.

On the Road is saturated in Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac's obsession with trying to live in a kind of endless present, a perennial now. And so even the small changes in his outlook are full of import—and I found the trajectory of the book, from melancholic optimism to a kind of apocalyptic pessimism striated with hopefulness, enormously moving. Sal starts off his travels in July of 1947 fearful but optimistic, and at first he experiences nearly everything with a sense of, well, ecstatic transport. Think of those passages early on where he's in the truck with "Montana Slim" and the other hobo-types hitching a ride out West, looking, almost greedily, at the fields passing by: "Soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado … looking southwest toward Denver itself a few miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out … I felt like an arrow that could shoot all the way." By the end of the book, on his final trip to Mexico with Dean Moriarty, Sal is enfolded in a more palpable spirit of pessimism; when he looks outward, it's in a mood of apocalyptic fervor: "At Childress in the hot sun we turned directly south on a lesser road and highballed across abysmal wastes to Paducah, Guthrie, and Abilene … we burned slowly into Abilene and all woke up to look at it."

September 04, 2007

When did our pal Levi go all Guardian on us? He's got an excellent post over at the Guardian blog about something I've been wanting to comment on myself. He asks, why is it necessary to try to be/write like Kerouac or act like a "beatnik" (or own a car) in order to write about Kerouac? Maddening for sure:

Jack Kerouac is famous for inspiring bad writing, most of it by young hipster wannabes who take his instructions like "You're a genius all the time" and "Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition" all too much to heart. Well, the stylistic crimes of the starry-eyed kids are nothing compared to the stylistic crimes of professional critics who don their Kerouac voices like Halloween costumes to turn in their two-thousand word articles, incorrectly believing that all they have to do is dumb down their sentence structures to sound authentically "beat".

Worse, the recent barrage of On The Road anniversary articles has revealed how alien the work of Jack Kerouac remains to many literary professionals, who invariably begin their articles with a variation on this familiar number: "The last time I read 'On The Road' I was a teenager on a Greyhound bus heading nowhere, leaving my parents' home for the first time, and I was scared but full of hope and Jack Kerouac was my guide". I suspect that most of these people are lying and have never read On The Road while sitting on a Greyhound bus heading nowhere (I also suspect that some of these critics have never left their parents' homes at all, but that's another topic).

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Well, we didn’t use the word “beat” out on the back of any City Lights publication, including Allen Ginsberg’s books. I wasn’t a member of the original Beat Generation. I was -- when they were in Columbia College, I was in graduate school at Columbia. I didn’t know any of them. And it was only after I came to San Francisco that I started meeting the poets, because a bookstore is a natural place for poets to congregate. And right from the beginning we tried to make City Lights a community center, which it soon became. And so, Ginsberg came in. I got associated with the Beats by publishing them. And that’s --

AMY GOODMAN: What does “the Beats” mean? What does it mean to you?

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Well, I never liked the term, and especially the word “beatnik” was never used by any of the poets, because that was a term evidently invented by Herb Caen, the San Francisco gossip columnist. It was the time of Sputnik, so this was a handy way for straight people to put down these dirty unwashed bohemians, call them “beatniks.”

AMY GOODMAN: Kerouac coined the term?

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: He didn’t coin -- he turned the --

AMY GOODMAN: Not “beatnik,” but the Beat Generation.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Yeah. He had more in mind -- being a Catholic, he had more in mind a beatitude. But then, he talked about it as jazz also. But there’s this whole romanticization of the black culture and the music that came out of black culture. And in our generation, there was also just a part of the general glorification of the natural man, because we had all been reading D.H. Lawrence, and the native unspoiled man and the gatekeeper in Lady Chatterley and the people in D.H. Lawrence’s Mexican book, The Plumed Serpent. And this was kind of what was in the consciousness of my generation, including Kerouac’s.

August 30, 2007

Wired's copy chief, Tony Long, makes the case that On the Road belongs in the "geek's literary canon":

Whether Kerouac was a "great" writer is certainly debatable (define "great," for starters); that he was one of America's most influential writers is beyond dispute. On the Road, at 50, sells more copies in a given year than most new fiction does, so it evidently still strikes a chord somewhere.

Kerouac gets kicked around pretty good in academia and by other writers, mostly East Coast snoots who wrinkle their noses at the idea of automatic writing. It was Truman Capote, remember, who dismissed Kerouac with one of the bitchiest literary putdowns of all time: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Without a doubt, writing on a scroll in a nonstop, three-week frenzy of Benzedrine-fueled inspiration doesn't represent the height of literary craft. But On the Road is a banshee cry for freedom, not pop literature, so in this case Kerouac's improvisation thoroughly guts Capote's measured prose.

While you're digesting that morsel, try this one: On the Road is as deserving of a place in the geek's literary canon as anything penned by Tolkien, Gibson or Dick. Kerouac didn't invent alien civilizations or futuristic worlds, but he helped break down the walls of convention in the real one. If the modern geek is the maverick he often claims to be, then he owes at least a cursory nod backward to a genuine maverick, one who helped pave the way while on a hopeless struggle to find himself.

Fifty years along, On the Road still resonates for those of us possessed of a restless spirit, who see gray conformity as spiritual death, who place the value of the individual above the mere possession of things. For us, Sal Paradise's odyssey stands as the antidote -- and as a warning to keep a close watch on our souls.

August 23, 2007

I'm sure some of you have been wondering how Cate Blanchett would pull off Dylan in the Dylan biopic, I'm Not There. Myself, I've been trying to picture David Cross as Allen Ginsberg. Well, here's a little clip to help all of us out.

August 15, 2007

Would you believe that On the Road is turning 50? Well, according to the New York Times and its completely mailed-in article about the anniversary of the book's publication, 'tis true. By my count, there's at least one factual error in the article and if you can spot it, leave a comment and I'll reward you with a book from the TBR.. Not all's a loss, however. At least they managed to get a quote from Ferlinghetti:

At City Lights Books, the San Francisco literary landmark (it sells 1,000 copies of “On the Road” every year), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet and publisher and co-founder of the store, mused on the continuing success of the book.

Mr. Ferlinghetti, 88, contrasted Kerouac’s work with Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” which he said was “the kind of book that you read when you are 18 and it’s just wonderful but if you read it when you are 35 or 50 you are embarrassed by its over-romantic tone and its flowery exuberance.” But having read “On the Road” when it first came out and he was in his 30s, and just last month, Mr. Ferlinghetti said, “It is really still ‘with it,’ you might say.”

August 07, 2007

By now, I'm sure you've heard that Charles Simic (or as Fox News calls him, Immigrant Simic) has been named the the 15th poet laureate of the United States, but did you know that if it weren't for William S. Burroughs (and a little stretching of both reality and the imagination) Simic may have never reached such a lofty position:

[The] Winter 1959 issue of the Chicago Review [the issue in which Simic's first published poems appeared] was the second Winter 1959 issue that had been prepared for publication. The first was suppressed by the University of Chicago in a censorship scandal; when the contents of that issue eventually saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. CR had been gathering steam under the stewardship of editor Irving Rosenthal and poetry editor Paul Carroll; they had published an important issue on San Francisco poets with a preface by Jack Kerouac, and their Summer 1958 Zen issue collected favorable notices from The Nation and Time. (Not all were pleased: CR’s faculty advisor, the novelist Richard Stern, told Rosenthal not to “turn [Chicago Review] into a magazine for San Francisco rejects,” and said of the Beat work they’d published: “This is as if garbage had garbage.”)

The suppressed issue was assembled by Rosenthal and Carroll and was supposed to include “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac, “The Sorrows of Priapus” and “The Garment of Ra” by Edward Dahlberg, and three poems by Gregory Corso. Most significantly, it was also to include “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs.

As you might have guessed, the editors caved to internal and external political pressures and pulled the original issue, putting in its place the second Winter 1959 issue containing poems by a then unpublished Charles Simic. It's a fascinating story and one that you can read more about at digital emuction.

July 12, 2007

The SF Chroniclegives some ink to the ongoing saga that is Gerald Nicosia versus the Kerouac estate:

In the newest wave of Kerouac books, Nicosia sees a concerted effort to erase his footprints.

"I have evidence that Viking Penguin publishers is deliberately removing my name from books on the Beat generation and Jack Kerouac," said Nicosia, 57, who lives in Corte Madera with his wife and two children.

In the past, he has criticized Kerouac's estate for selling pieces of the archive rather than selling it intact to a library. (The often-cited example is the 2001 sale of the original "On the Road" scroll -- which is now on a national tour -- to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for $2.4 million.) Other portions of the estate are now in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library and at the University of Massachusetts.

Nicosia believes that Viking Penguin is removing his name under pressure from Kerouac executor John Sampas, brother of Stella Sampas, Kerouac's third wife.

Sampas, reached by phone at his home in Kerouac's native Lowell, Mass., last week, denied Nicosia's allegations. "Never happened," Sampas said. "I have never tried to have his name suppressed from anything, nor would I ever do that to any author."

Viking Penguin publisher Paul Slovak also dismissed Nicosia's charges. "It's absolutely not true that Viking or the Kerouac estate has tried to remove his name from our books," Slovak said by phone last week. "He's been making these claims for over 10 years. It's kind of sad that he's bringing it up again, especially because this year we should be celebrating Kerouac."

Although those he accuses of wrongdoing call Nicosia's grievances quixotic and self-promotional, author Maxine Hong Kingston, a UC Berkeley emeritus professor, has recommended that he present his argument in a talk at the Modern Language Association or at PEN USA, the West Coast branch of the international civil rights and authors organization.

July 05, 2007

I'm slowly overcoming being buried in rows and columns of spreadsheets not to mention all of the discussions and meetings that always seem to be linked to my most miserable work experiences. Yesterday, I got out of the office and took a walking tour along with the wife and the wee one of the wilds of Durham, which included the spotting of three black bears, a couple of lemurs, and some wolves (not howling) along with your more typical pigs and roosters and a very large and odoriferous steer. We also made a tornado and walked through a house of butterflies and looked at containers of roaches and spiders and beetles. I couldn't help thinking of the zoo that I grew up going to as a kid in Selma, Alabama. Believe it or not--and I can't find anything online to verify this claim but I swear to it--the zoo surrounded a sewage treatment plant. Of course, using the word zoo is being generous. I remember only a few caged deer (which would never seem to be same deer more than once), some peacocks, goats, that sort of thing. However, I guess if you're going to mask the smell of animals being kept in the heat of a summer in central Alabama and you need a place to keep them, the sewage plant by the river is as good a place as any.

At any rate, I'm going to try and get this place back to normal, whatever that may be. Maybe a little link or two to start your morning. First, this interesting story over at the New Statesman--Naomi West speaks with Carolyn Cassady:

She can never look at On the Road (partly written on her typewriter in the attic of the Cassadys' San Francisco home) with fondness. The book covers the unhappiest of times early in their marriage, when Neal would disappear on frenetic road trips accompanied by Kerouac (Sal Paradise in the book) and often Neal's highly sexed teenaged first wife, LuAnne (Marylou). While they careened between jazz joints and visits with William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), the professor's daughter Cassady was left sobbing back home, an impoverished single mother. Cassady did not read the entire book until decades later. "I didn't want to know what they'd done when they were away from me. With LuAnne."

In her own memoir, Off the Road, republished this month, her marriage to Neal Cassady frequently sounds like a feat of endurance, with his gambling, his lifelong tendency to "borrow" cars, his sexual profligacy (she once walked in on him and Ginsberg). She regards her own behaviour with an equally tough eye, criticising her naive attempts to mould Neal (a reform-school graduate raised by an alcoholic father) into a family man as conventional as her own father. "Fortunately I hung in there. I learned so much." Later in their marriage, she even befriended and counselled Neal's other lovers.

The early 1950s period when she was both wife to Neal and lover to Jack - initially prompted by Neal - was "the best time of all. I somehow overcame any old-fashioned notions when that happened," she laughs. Kerouac's letters rhapsodising about nights in with wine and homemade pizza reveal how much he prized his part in their home life. "He thought of our family as his family and always talked about my kids as though they were his."

Cassady insists that Kerouac's version of Neal's character did not acknowledge his intense desire for respectability. Although, in the years leading to his death in 1968, Neal became a drop-out icon, driving Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' bus across America, Cassady maintains that, until their divorce, the pillars of his self-worth were his young family and his work. For eight years he worked as a brakeman for the South Pacific railroad and he tackled every odd job from tyre re-capper to parking attendant with equal vim. When On the Road was published, shortly before Neal served two years in San Quentin accused of supplying marijuana, she recalls: "He wished nobody would read it. He felt it glorified his hedonism when he was trying to be looked at as this upstanding citizen."

Cassady is thrilled that a mark of posthumous respectability is to be granted to Neal this year. Her surviving ten-minute scrap of tape with Neal reading Proust to Jack is to be added to the British Library sound archive. "This is the only evidence we have of how he spoke, in a very cultured way. They were in their prime, in 1952, before the drugs and alcohol took over. It's one of my most precious possessions."

June 24, 2007

June 22, 2007

Here's video of the On the Road scroll being unrolled recently for its display in Kerouac's birthplace, Lowell, Mass. I admit, it's about as exciting as watching paint dry, but those of us who have yet to see it in person get our best look at the scroll since it went on its cross-country tour a few years ago.

June 15, 2007

I lost count at some point in February, but I know I've seen at least five of these "On the road like Kerouac" stories from our nation's various and sundry newspapers. This time, it's USA Today's Jerry Shriver, who "reread the book during a 1,727-mile journey trip through America's midsection. His goals: to See What's Out There and give armchair Kerouac fans an update on the state of roadside culture. (Owing to his middle age and hopeless entrenchment in the establishment, pliant bohemian chicks were off-limits.)" It appears that he did so in a rented Mitsubishi Eclipse, which explain why out of everything to see and write about on the open road, he managed around what looks to be about 1,200 words, or at least that's what his editors allowed, and most of it no better than this:

Here in Kansas City come roses, roasted meats, Bass Pro shops, cherished friends, saloons where you can smoke, an underground edginess, plentiful parking spaces and tree blossoms falling onto young women who sport bare midriffs and stoners who brag of skateboarding while drunk.

June 11, 2007

According to Variety, Gus Van Sant is set to direct the long overdue bigscreen version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

Shortly after the Wolfe book was published in 1967, its film rights were purchased by entrepreneur Alfred Roven. Not a film producer, Roven had some meetings over the years with filmmakers but was very protective. When he died, Roven left the rights to his children, Daryn and Alison Roven. FilmColony's Gladstein was introduced to them by attorney Peter Grossman, and for the first time, the rights were entrusted to a producer.

Van Sant, whose latest film, "Paranoid Park," was honored at Cannes, signed on quickly. The filmmaker cast Kesey in his 1993 film "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" and dedicated his 2002 film "Gerry" to the author, who died in 2001. Van Sant enlisted Black, with whom he's collaborating on a biopic of slain San Francisco pol Harvey Milk.

It's likely Wolfe will not be a major character in the film, which will focus on Kesey and include events that occurred after the road trip.

June 05, 2007

I guess it's too much to ask that in a year in which Kerouac's great accomplishments are being celebrated for there to peace and harmony and all that jazz:

The author of a noted Kerouac biography, "Memory Babe," Gerald Nicosia, is holding a press conference in Manhattan today, where he will claim that Viking Penguin has been removing his name from books it publishes on Kerouac and other Beat writers, at the request of the executor of the Kerouac estate, John Sampas.

Mr. Nicosia said "mountains of evidence" and press packets would be available. The publisher of Viking, Paul Slovak, told The New York Sun that Mr. Nicosia's claims were "absolutely untrue."

But Mr. Nicosia told the Sun that he was subject to a "blacklist" and "censorship," which he believes are in part a response to his having supported a lawsuit in 1994 by Kerouac's daughter, Jan Kerouac, who had sued the relatives of Jack Kerouac's third wife and widow, Stella Sampas, including her brother, the estate's executor, Mr. Sampas.

June 04, 2007

Writing in the Guardian, James Campbell attempts to put Ginsberg's Howl in some sort of perspective fifty years after it led to a bookseller's arrest for peddling obscene literature:

The little pamphlet, 44 stapled pages, hardly the size of a postcard, was published by City Lights Books, Number 4 in the Pocket Poets Series overseen by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and issued from his famous bookshop on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. The poet and doctor William Carlos Williams contributed a short preface, lending the collection an air of respectability, but no mainstream publisher would have touched it. Ginsberg's extravagant, free-form verses were aesthetically off-putting to most editors and critics in the mid-50s, but his language - his too-hard "wording" - was simply outside the law.To put things briefly in perspective: at least two out of the last four Man Booker prizewinners (The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre) could not have been published in their present form before 1960. The same goes for almost the entire output of John Updike and Philip Roth. Some writers devised ways of getting round the prohibition on four-letter words - Norman Mailer came up with "fug" to colour the speech of soldiers in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead. Some, such as Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, were content to have their risky books published abroad, usually in Paris, where the Olympia Press and its offshoots rejected books without a high degree of sexual content. Most just avoided the problem.

Ginsberg's book contains the poem "America", which has the line "America ... Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb". Another, "Transcription of Organ Music", practically a prose poem, offers the recollection "When I first got laid, HP graciously took my cherry ..." with the implication that both the speaker and HP were men. But it was the title poem that drew the most attention. The book was printed in England by Villiers, which shipped the first consignment to California without incident. But 520 copies of the second printing were seized by US customs, on the grounds that the writing was obscene. In a remark much repeated in ironical tones, the chief collector of customs said of "Howl": "You wouldn't want your children to come across it."

The books arriving from England were impounded in March, but in late May the collector of customs decided not to proceed with the case - Ferlinghetti had had a further 2,500 copies printed in the US, to get round the legal technicality of importing obscene material - and the outlook appeared bright for the poet and his publisher. However, within a week, in a sting operation, two officers of the Juvenile Bureau of the San Francisco Police Department entered City Lights, where the "banned" Howl and Other Poems was now the main item on display, and made to buy a copy. When the counter assistant Shig Murao accepted money for the book and a magazine, the Miscellaneous Man, he was arrested on June 3 for "peddling" literature likely to be harmful to minors. (Charges against the Miscell-aneous Man were soon dropped.) Ferlinghetti turned himself in a few days later.

May 25, 2007

I wish someone would help fashion designers realize that a backpack priced at $1,300 or a sneaker that'll run you almost $300 cannot and should not be associated with a man who was fond of getting his next cigarette out of ashtrays. Syntax of Things sez this "Jack Kerouac Project" is the height of fashion absurdity, a faux pas if you will, based on the cost alone:

Hogan will unveil its first-ever outerwear piece on Tuesday, when the Tod’s Group-owned brand debuts the Jack Kerouac Project, a capsule collection of six leather goods pieces inspired by the Beat novelist, writer, poet, and artist, which will be available exclusively at Paris retailer Colette for one month. In addition to the $1,590 bomber style jacket, the collection consists of two styles of shoes (a $295 high top sneaker and a $475 working boot) and three bags (a travel bag, book bag, and back pack priced from $950 to $1,290). Colette will celebrate the launch by showcasing a series of photographs influenced by Kerouac’s novel On the Road in its iconic rue Saint-Honoré store windows. Following its debut at Colette, the collection will be available in all Hogan stores worldwide beginning in July.

May 18, 2007

A friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, poet Gary Snyder was immortalized as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a story about a group of friends interested in backpacking, women, carousing and Buddhist philosophy. But if you see Snyder at the Ojai Poetry Festival, do not call him “Japhy.”

For the record, Snyder says the character is a fictional creation. He was “modeled on who I was then,” Snyder says, but the stories of Japhy Ryder are not really based in truth. Snyder, who lived with Kerouac, also claims the book is not his friend’s best work. “It was written too hastily,” he says.

The real Gary Snyder, though perhaps less well-known by mainstream America than his fictional counterpart, is a poetic force of nature. According to his Web site at UC Davis, where he taught until recently, Snyder has published 18 books and had his work translated into more than 20 languages. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder’s work is infused with the language of the outdoors. Over the years, his poetry has won him numerous awards, from the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 to the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1997.

And although Snyder may not be a big fan of Dharma Bums, the book itself does give a generalized (if distorted) overview of the real bard. As in the book, Snyder is interested in Buddhism and is a proponent of environmentalism, and was active in both long before they became hip trends. Snyder acknowledges his early ecological mindset by citing his Four Changes manifesto, which he wrote in 1969. Looking back, Snyder is still amazed by how well the ideas about population, energy, pollution and other ecological issues have held up over time. “My gosh, it could have been written yesterday,” he says.

May 17, 2007

If by chance you're looking for a place to rent in Lowell, Mass., you might want to give the number in the photo above a call. Three bedrooms in an upstairs apartment for $1,100 a month ain't too bad. Plus, you'll be living in the house in which Jack Kerouac was born.

May 11, 2007

A few days ago I read a recap of a recent Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola in which the famed filmmaker said that the movie adaptation of On the Road will start taking shape once the leads are cast. This reminded me of a time in the early 90s, back when the rumors were flying that the OtR adaptation was imminent and some folks were saying that Tom Cruise would be acting in the film. If you ever want to see me get in full petition mode, threaten to put Tom Cruise within shouting distance of acting in this movie and I'll put together a petition and subsequent protest that would make PETA proud. Hopefully Mr. Cruise has gotten a little too long in the tooth these days (not to mention that this role might not mesh with his "religious" beliefs) and I can't think of any other actors who invoke the same fear and nausea as does the diminutive one.

In case you didn't know, Coppola has tapped Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) to direct On the Road. Back in February, Salles had this to say about the state of the adaptation and about a side project he did in preparation for the filming...whenever that may be:

I was approached by Francis Coppola after he saw MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
to consider it. It was a book that was very important for me, and for
several generations. It didn’t only have a repercussion in America but
also elsewhere. It is really about the birth of counter-culture, the
beat generation but more than that. Really about experiencing things
first hand and not trying to fit into the mode. And I think that today,
when you see the reality shows, and you see what is out there. People
tend to live experiences vicariously and I thought maybe this is the
time to do something like ON THE ROAD where the experiments with drugs
as a form to expand your consciousness, or experimenting with sex also
as a form of amplifying your perception of the world, and redefining
what family is all about, may be an interesting point now.

But still, I didn’t think I was equipped to do the film when I was
invited to do it, so I said, let me do a documentary to search for the
theme and to see what could be really interesting in it. Coppola
thought it a little unusual but said: “Do it if you want to.” So
basically what I have done is that: With three people I did the journey
of ON THE ROAD, the journey that is in the book. Crossing the country
from East to West, then from the North to the South. And in the process
we interviewed some of the beat poets who were alive in the 1970s, like
Gary Snyder, who was the first environmental poet of the 1950s and
1960s, or people who were part of ON THE ROAD as characters, and who
are still alive.

And finally we interviewed people who were influenced by the book, and
that goes all the way from Wim Wenders, who is a director I really
love, to David Byrne, Laurie Anderson…

May 01, 2007

Greetings to all of you visiting by way of Gawker. Hope you'll take a few minutes to tour the site and a few more minutes to visit some of the great bloggers listed in my "Go Read Now" section.

I do want to add that while it may have seemed from my post on Friday that I have a huge axe to grind with the Book Reviewers (note the caps), I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I'm with them and the NBCC folks as far as saving the Book Reviews goes. Sometimes it just seems like the litbloggers need a champion (and not just Ed). Not that I'm volunteering, mind you. It's as if the mainstream media BRers need to be reminded that we're not in this as a big fuck you to them. Nor do we want to see a single one of their pens stilled. I know most of them know this and they're well aware that we do this for the same reason that many of them do (minus the paycheck): the love of books.

By the way, no one does blogging/reviewing/bookloving with more passion than Dan Wickett, and that's why you should read what he has to say about this whole thing.

As for the promised reviews, my plan is to have a couple up by Friday. We'll see.

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Speaking of Dan, he's transitioning from poetry to short stories this month over at the Emerging Writers Network. I'm going to try to join in, especially seeing as almost half of the books I've read so far this year have been short story collections. If you want to dip your toe in the lake of classic short fiction, check out this site.

David Lynch has a plan to put a stop to school violence: meditation. Seriously. {via}

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Littourati is back and has picked up his cartographical rendering of Kerouac's On the Road. If you haven't already, link to his site and continue to follow along. Right now, he's in California's Inland Empire, including a trip to Bakersfield, the city in which I spent the first night of my marriage to Elaine. Before you laugh, we happened to be on our way to San Francisco, but needed a break. A hotel on Buck Owens Boulevard seemed a perfect place.

Very few people choose to live here. There's a single post office and a smattering of shops, gas stations, restaurants, and spas. Most houses are tucked beyond view into the slopes above or below the highway. Stringent regulations restrict building and forbid the mounting of billboards. In winter, when even the public bus service ceases to operate, Big Sur appears nearly deserted. And that's the way residents like it.

Since the 1920s, those eccentric personalities have included photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, writers Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack Kerouac, and the builders whose offbeat inspirations have become tourist destinations.